A Letter To Nurmengard
by Librasmile
Summary: Yes love, isn't it ironic? Your ghoulish successor has hoist me on my own petard…Dumbledore looks back with anger and regret.


**A Letter To Nurmengard**

**Logline: **_Yes love, isn't it ironic? Your ghoulish successor has hoist me on my own petard…Dumbledore looks back with anger and regret._

**Author: **Librasmile

**Word Count:** 1,420

**Warnings:** _Language, sexual situations, and, dare I say it, a hint of mpreg that could have – should have? - been. Horrors…_ _* grins *_

**Author's Note: **_Consider this an unexpected gift to those of you who've read __**For the Price of My Familiar**__ and __**Answers to Nothing**__ and were hoping to see Dumbledore's reaction. I think this can stand alone. However, feel free to check out the other stories for a fuller understanding of this one._

**Disclaimer: **_I own nothing, except the vice-chair of the Sublime Ottoman State's Court of Alchemists and the as yet unnamed young mother-to-be. * grin * All other characters are the property of J.K. Rowling and are solely used for entertainment. I make no money from this usage._

* * *

><p><strong>Category:<strong> Post

**Type:** Letter

**Return Post Allowed:** No

**Security Status: **_Cleared, No curses detected._ Filed by chief administrator, Nurmengard Detention Center

_Cleared, no dark magic detected._ Filed by ( name withheld ) head curse breaker, Gringotts Bank, Kiev Branch Office

**Security Addendum 1:** _Invisible ink detected; will only appear to recipient's eyes. Also, timed charm found on the parchment itself. Parchment will disintegrate one hour after the recipient has read it. No toxins or other charms found. Safe for handling._ Filed by ( name withheld ) vice-chair, the Court of Alchemists, Sublime Ottoman State, Constantinople*

**Security Addendum 2:** _Sender has top-level authorization for communicating with recipient._ _Cleared for delivery. _Filed by Amelia Bones, Order of Merlin, member, Wizengamot, Chief of Magical Law Enforcement, Ministry of Magic, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

**From:** Undisclosed

**Date:** Undisclosed

**Recipient:** Inmate No. GG1883-08051945

And so love here we are. You forever trapped in your dark cell. Me falling deeper and deeper into ever darker times. Are we not a pair?

Forgive my boorish lack of a proper salutation. I presume we are long past all that. On the other hand, do not expect me to regret your current circumstance or the fact that I have never seen fit to comment on them – or anything – to you since your incarceration. Nor would I have done so now except…

Ahh, love, he should have been ours! Not the get of some transient, utilitarian encounter, a superstitious rite** I endured solely to get my hands on the phoenix familiar I needed. You have never met Fawkes, have you? It's just as well. I highly doubt any phoenix would have willingly bound itself to me were I still within your orbit.

He has your kind of pride you know. Not your glittering charm but a dark radiance nonetheless. He has my sense of the dramatic, his own black humor and my hands. And it takes everything in me not to bring the castle down around him just to hide my guilt.

As if the castle _would_ obey me in this. The stones have seen too much of how often I threw him to the wolves – no, fed him to my lions – to cover my own shame.

Yes, it's a fool's wish. And such notions are naught but a beggar's horse. You know the saying? _If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride_? No matter.

Yes, we _could_ have managed it. We had the power, both of us, separately and together. Alas, the necessary humility was in rather short supply on both our parts. As for self-sacrifice…I couldn't even manage to look after my poor Arianna with any semblance of competence because I so resented her needing me, needing Aberforth, needing _anything_. So, no, I was hardly going to enchant myself to carry a child. And the thought of you doing so could keep me laughing for centuries if I had that much life left.

Some things are best done the natural way, no matter what magic makes possible.

But I still…at the oddest times…recall his mother's eyes. She was a silent girl. I remember nothing of her schooling here. But her eyes…her eyes were a shadowed landscape and an abyss, neither of her own making. I have never encountered someone who seemed so…unowned. Not abandoned. But defined by others. Whatever core there was to her lay buried under that landscape, collapsed into that abyss and if her son's life is any indication, it never emerged. I've never encountered someone so _unlived_. She was not _you_ love. Nothing like.

And yet…he was sent to me through _her_, not you. All the times we lay together, the force of my flesh against yours, yours against mine, the passion we made, the _magic_, and there was nothing more. Yet one paltry fuck – forgive my language, I fear the years of anger and my association with my Gryffindors have coarsened my tongue – with a woman, nay a _girl_, who could barely be bothered to inhabit her own mind, let alone her own body, produces…a prince. My dark prince.

Is it any wonder I let my lions bite and tear at him? He _should_ have been ours – or he should never have been. He should have been sparkling as well as brilliant. He should have been popular as well as powerful. He should have raced to embrace the sunlight instead of hiding away in the shadows. He should have been in _my _house. Not Tom Riddle's. I tell myself he has no part of me. He belongs to _her_ and her sad, pathetic dispossession. I should have been able to ignore him.

But he _flies_, love! No matter how many times he's beaten down. No matter who or what scorns him, he _soars…_ Even when he thinks he's defeated…Oh my love, he's so much better than you and I. No matter what weight I pile on his shoulders, he _rises_…shredded faith and all…

_What_ could you and I have done if we'd had just a modicum of his…Spirit? Will? What do I call it? He has something you and I never did. Isn't that what your child is supposed to be? More than you? Better?

He knows now. And I shall lose him. What pathetic, false-faith hold I had on him shall break.

He swears it isn't so, that duty will keep him at my side. Bah. It wasn't duty that brought him back to me in the first place. It was love. But as long as that love was for a dead woman it didn't matter. I could always dangle her memory in front of him in whatever form I chose to bring him to heel.

But now there's a living woman. Hardly old enough – dear, gods, the same age as his mother was – to be called a woman. But nevertheless breathing – and full of life. Her own and the one his other master forced him to sire on her.

It happened midsummer. Yet another rite. Yet another young girl. Yet another unwanted conception. My mistakes written on a succeeding generation.

And they are keeping it, this dark-begotten child. Not that they had much of a choice, if they wished to avoid Voldemort's wrath.

I could hint that the child could be born a monster, a fiend destined to repeat Tom's dark path. But even Longbottom wouldn't be taken in by such hogwash. Not for long. And when it comes to my dark child, a dark arts expert in his own right, not even for a second.

So he stands suspended between choosing to continue down the dark tunnel of a mission I've set down for him and choosing to escape into the light of a new life. Instead of wrapping his life around a dead woman's memory, he has his soon-to-be-born child's life to protect and plan for. What would you or I choose?

I cannot dangle _this_.

What long game your successor is playing now I can't yet tell, but I fear it's fueled by personal knowledge of me that he should not have. Yes love, isn't it ironic? Your ghoulish successor has hoist me on my own petard.

And so I write to you, knowing you can never respond, yet vainly hoping just the act, the _humility_, of placing this problem before you will convince some cosmic power to grant me the insight on how to proceed.

As I said, I will lose him. And what then?

Rest assured, I will not bore you with any little tidbits of strategy that you could, however unlikely, slip to the Death Eaters via your erstwhile colleagues. I have not aged _that _much.

But I _will_ confess…had I the courage…I would call up the shade of Eileen Prince and beg her to plead my case with him. Yes, even after our…conjoined nightmare with Arianna…I would dare.

For he has his mother's eyes, you see. Underneath the venom and the spite, that brittle, _brittle_ brilliance, and the _**anger**_…he has her eyes. Filled with the same dark-starred landscape, the same abyss of pain.

She could speak to him and he would listen.

As I never did really. To either of them.

But courage fails me. Ha. How's that for a Gryffindor? And so I will lose him to the grandchild I can never publicly acknowledge in my lifetime, to the fact that I can never publicly acknowledge _him_.

…Oh my love, he should have been ours…

***~*Fin*~***

**Author's End Notes:** * _Yes, I know it's Istanbul now. However, I presume that the Court of Alchemists is rather tradition-bound and would probably still refer the capital as Constantinople._

** _The Beltane Rite, considered by some to be a fertility ritual. For more information, see __**For the Price of My Familiar**__. _

_If you'd like to know who the mother-to-be is, you can check out __**Well Done, My Good and Faithful Servant**__ or __**The Healer's Apprentice**__. _

_Aaaannnnd my record continues for writing a happy – okay, not so happy – one-shot when I should be writing my next __**Confessions of a Cornwall Grad**__ chapter. Sigh. Isn't it nice to know some things never change? *grins, ducks and runs*_


End file.
